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Tolls for transit help those who need it most: Keenan

When Mayor John Tory announced his proposal to implement modest tolls on the Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway last week, it was no surprise when the announcement turned out to be controversial. There’s a vocal group of people who believe the city government is little more than an elaborate money-wasting machine and who oppose any new revenue proposal on those grounds. There’s also a vocal group who think there is no more virtuous an action in life one can take than driving a car and who view providing unfettered, free access to road space for automobiles as the most sacred, and urgent, service a government can deliver. To the extent that the voting block we called “Ford Nation” was more than a personality cult, these two opinions formed the very basis of its ideology.

And so there was Doug Ford out promoting his book, rhetorically rolling coal against the proposal and threatening to run for mayor again to oppose it.

The battle lines are well dug in on that front, I’m not sure much is to be gained by rehashing the same arguments about road pricing that are already well developed — although an op-ed in the Star by three academics on Thursday did a good job of outlining the basic case in favour of tolls and congestion charges (including the observation that in places where they’re implemented, support for them actually goes up after people have started paying them and seeing the results).

But one argument in particular, one equally common outside the Ford Nation political umbrella, is worth taking a close look at. It says that you need to provide better transit alternatives before charging for road use into and out of the congested core. The thinking here, reasonable enough on its face, is that many of Toronto’s poorest people live in the far corners of the city where they are very poorly served by public transit, and it would be unfair and regressive to charge them for driving into downtown when they can’t reasonably commute by TTC.

The problem with this argument is that facts don’t support the assertion that it is poor people in the transit-deprived inner suburbs driving into downtown right now. The longtime transit journalist Stephen Wickens recently pointed out on Twitter and in the Beach Metro News that a third of all car trips to downtown originate in two planning districts: midtown Toronto (District 4) and the Danforth/Beaches area (District 6).

This lines up with information I pointed to last summer by transit planner Laurence Lui that shows the city wards with the highest percentage of car trips downtown in the morning are mostly clustered adjacent to downtown — the Beaches, The Danforth, East York, Corso Italia, Don Valley, Yonge-Eglinton and central Etobicoke among them. (The only ward where car use is more prevalent than transit for morning trips into the downtown core is the ward including the Beach). These are not what people call “transit deserts” — many of these neighbourhoods have subway lines running through them or next to them or quick streetcar or bus access to the subway. What they do have going for them is that their residents are, on average, affluent enough to consider car travel an option (including gas and parking costs) and that they’re close enough to downtown to make a car trip less of a nightmare than it is from further away.

Meanwhile, in the notoriously worst transit areas of Toronto — also known to be lower-income areas — people are already using the TTC to get downtown. In the ward that includes Jane and Finch, 83 per cent of morning trips into the core are on transit. In the northeast Scarborough ward that includes Malvern, 79 per cent of downtown-bound morning commuters take transit.

In short: the people with the best access to transit (other than those living inside the downtown core already) are the most likely to drive to work downtown, and the people with the worst transit service are the most likely to be suffering on the bus.

(It is probably important to note that these are travel patterns into downtown — travel patterns to other destinations are remarkably different. Most people in the inner and outer suburbs do drive to work, to other places in the inner suburbs or the outer suburbs. They just don’t drive in high numbers if they’re going into the downtown core. Since the DVP and Gardiner, where tolls are proposed, serve traffic into and out of the core, and since much of the transit we’re proposing to build including the Relief Line, SmartTrack and Scarborough subway extension are primarily about facilitating riders going into and out of the core, I think the specifics of those trips, and the ways they differ from other trips, are especially relevant.)

This doesn’t change the urgency of improving transit service across the board — if anything, it increases it. Those using the TTC the most to get downtown are suffering long, long commute times, on notoriously overcrowded vehicles. Those with easier access to fast transit are not using it to get downtown, presumably because it is unpleasantly overcrowded or unreliable and because they have the means to consider cars and alternative.

What it does change is the calculation of what our priorities and strategies might be. Drivers into the core mostly have transit options, but choose driving because they can afford to and it is more attractive, so perhaps asking them to pay directly for the privilege is reasonable. Those most likely to use transit appear to be doing so out of necessity — it’s clearly not because it’s so fast and convenient for them — and also suffer the least convenient commutes, and so raising TTC fares on them even higher is perhaps less reasonable. The imperative to focus on building better transit (as a service to those who need it and as an enticement to those who have choices) is obvious. In this context, tolls on the main car routes into and out of downtown appear like an all the more justified way to help fund it.

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